‘God is dead, we have killed him’

Elliot Ziwira
No pain beats the knowledge that your suffering, poverty and hopelessness could be human manufactured. It is so irksome to know that basics like food, water and shelter can be a luxury that one can only dream. True Nelson Mandela was spot on when he said that poverty, like slavery, is a human creation.

Imagining that one needs 50 years or more of toil to earn the monthly salary of the custodian of one’s medical aid scheme and yet one’s family wallows in abject poverty somewhere in the slums and cannot access medical facilities paid for, is a travesty of justice. So painful.

How horrendous it is for a mother to know that another woman’s son is responsible for dragging her own child into the abyss and near extinction?

She would wilt inside if she learns that in two months, 100 years of her son’s toiling will be in another woman’s son’s pockets.
Such is the glaring disparity between the rich and the poor – our own creation – which makes the madman in Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Parable of the Madman” (1886) to ask: “Where is God?”

The Bible tells us that: “He, who loves money, will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth, with gain. This is all vanity” (Ecclesiastes 5v10).

True, our own skin and colour is rising against us.
Having traded their souls with the devil for opulence they block their ears to our pleas for tolerance and close their eyes to our suffering. Are all animals equal then?

No! Some are more equal than others. The majority of us will toil to death like the all too powerful horse, Boxer in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (1945); leaving nothing to show for it.

And everyone pretends not to know anything. No accountability, no nothing. Is that what we have all been reduced to dullards?
Somebody knew something and plays Benjamin, the all-knowing and sceptical donkey in “Animal Farm” (1945), who believes that the negation of value in a corrupt world through silence is the only option for survival, and simply says, “Donkeys live longer. Has anyone of you ever seen a dead donkey?”

Have we all been reduced to that?
Artists as “truth’s defence” have always been contemptuous of human folly regardless of creed, time or place. Man is inherently evil and malicious.

George Orwell examines such tendencies in “Animal Farm”. Shakespeare condemns the vice and folly inhering in man in “Twelfth Night”, “The Merchant of Venice”, “Julius Caesar”, and “King Lear”.

In “The Mayor of Casterbridge” (1886) Thomas Hardy ponders the senility of man in his quest to conquer the world before he conquers one man-himself, through the protagonist, Michael Henchard, who in a drunken stupor and temperamental idiocy sells his wife and daughter to a sailor at an auction.

After committing this heinous act, fortune seems to smile at him when he travels to Casterbridge where he rises from obscurity to become the richest man in the town. Subsequently he becomes the mayor.

But as fate would have it, as is the case when one sells his soul to Lucifer, his wife, Susan comes back to haunt him when providence brings her back into his life; and the truth comes out; and with it his fortunes begin to wane, bringing him down from the summit of the echelons of power and affluence to insignificance.

He eventually dies a pauper – the same way he came to the town.
Ironically, his former servant, Farfrae assumes his place; taking all that once belonged to him, including his beautiful Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane whom he thought to be the daughter he once sold. Such is the tragic nature of life.

Wole Soyinka in “Kongi’s Harvest”, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o in “Devil on the Cross”, questions Africa’s yearning for new beginnings in old ideologies. Africa, he implores, should not look beyond itself to see its enemies.

He explores the way man oppresses his fellow men through ideological indoctrination by seeking legitimacy in traditional national practices and yet at the same time using an alien form of governance as a way of hiding their true nature of suffering.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o embraces the rational of the complexity of man in his struggle for dominance, by highlighting the new breed of oppressor and imperialist in the post-colonial Africa who is everything else in the old order or more save for the colour of his skin.

He is contemptuous, like Soyinka and Chirikure Chirikure in “Hakurarwi” (1998), of society’s tendency of tolerating wayward behaviour until it is too late to harness even the slightest common sense.

The devil that is on the cross in “Devil on the Cross” is not the white imperialist, colonialist and oppressor with his slavery and colonisation, but the African in the new dispensation, who feels that the thief who steals a chicken to salvage his family from the jaws of starvation, is a criminal who should rot in jail; and the one who grabs vast traits of resources like land-agricultural and commercial and cheat fellow citizens into lining his own pockets, is a businessman.

In the title poem in “Hakurarwi” (We shall not sleep), Chirikure bemoans society’s tendencies of tolerating those bent on shifting societal norms and values to suit their means.

It is society that creates complacency in individuals by feeding their egos and allowing them to do whatever they feel like, only to try and stop them after they have gone so far as defecating in the communal well.

Society should not stand at the fringes and wait for disaster to strike for it to know that evil exists in its own ranks. What guides a community to a rotten substance is not the substance itself, but the foul stench emanating from it.

Chirikure also takes a swipe at individualism and materialism at the centre of the paralysis and malaise pervading our nation today as having its roots in society itself, because “the greatest tragedy of our time is not the few who have destroyed but the vast majority who have sat idly by”, (Martin Luther King Jnr).

The poet also castigates the deification of man through selective justice: punishing the poor who steal out of desperation while glorifying the big fish that swallow us all through obscene plunder.

Light “punishment” like forced retirement trivialises the treasonous pillage we are witnessing.
Probably the regional magistrate, Ollyn Rudo Nzuma, in the interview in “A Tragedy of Lives” (2003) edited by Chiedza Musengezi and Irene Staunton, aptly sums it all when she says: “Hunger drives the women to commit these petty offences … Those who can pay will escape the jail term … We say the law applies equally to all people, but the anomalies exist: a poor person ends up serving 20 days in prison with labour, a rich person does not.”

Truly “God is dead. We have killed him, you and I”, (The Parable of the Madman, 1886).